Ready Player One:

Despite its apparently lightweight theme of life inside a videogame, watching this movie requires a great deal of concentration. The first 10 minutes are serious and complex exposition based on the novel by Ernest Cline. Younger audience members may find the going a little easier if they are serious gamers. In short, we have a Steve Jobs-type genius named Halliday (Mark Rylance) who has created a virtual reality world called The Oasis, where most people in this future world 30 years from now spend their waking moments. America's cities are a mess, descending into rubble, as humanity has given up on trying to keep ahead of the crumbling infrastructure and the search for some kind of quality of life. Instead, most people spend their time as avatars in The Oasis, involved in adventures of their choice. They leave to eat, or to use the bathroom, but that's it. The film is rife with '80s references. The main character, a young man named Wade (Ty Sheridan) whose avatar name is Pazival, drives the Back to the Future DeLorean when he's in The Oasis. We see The Iron Giant, Chucky from the horror movies in which the doll became a murderer, and characters from Tomb Raider, Nightmare on Elm Street, Tron, and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, to name but a few. There is an evil corporation that wants to take over the country while its citizens are engaged in their virtual world, and a potential romance between Wade and Samantha (Olivia Cook), whose avatars meet in The Oasis, but like most everyone, have never met in the real world. The action is non-stop once the battle lines are set, with everything from the T-Rex from Jurassic Park, to the Godzilla monster from the Japanese movies thrown into the fray. It's complicated, the special effects are outstanding, and the story has a great deal of creativity and imagination behind it. Director Steven Spielberg said it was the third-hardest movie he has ever made after Jaws and Saving Private Ryan. Rated 14A for language and one suggestive scene.

Ghostland:

This slasher flick has had no theatrical distribution in Canada or the US, and only showed up in theatres in France, as it is a French co-production. The story is pretty standard in slasher terms, but the backstory is more interesting than the movie. A mother inherits a house from her aunt and she moves in with her two young daughters. For no apparent reason, intruders
enter the home and commit horrific acts which leaves the girls traumatized beyond all reasonable survival … but they grow up, each struggling with what the events have done to their lives and to their personalities, and 16 years later they reunite at the house … and then things get very strange. In keeping with the slasher theme, there was a real-life event that was equally traumatic. Taylor Hickson, a young actress from Kelowna, playing one of the daughters as a teen, was directed, during the production to pound ever harder on a door with a sheet of glass in it … directed to pound on the glass in take after take the glass shattered, she fell through the door, and resulted in 70 stitches to her face, leaving her permanently disfigured. As you might expect, a lawsuit has been filed. The film itself is violent and has a lot of meaningless and hurtful
behaviour. Not the best of the genre, but has its scary moments. Rated 14A.

Super Troopers 2:

17 years ago this stoner movie became a cult hit, focusing on a sad group of State Troopers from Vermont. They should have left that movie where it belonged ... firmly planted in the year 2001, but no, somebody came up with the idea of crowdfunding to get this sequel made. The story is ridiculous, which is the point, I suppose. It turns out that a border town on the Quebec-Vermont border is about to be annexed by the United States, and the 2 original troopers, all of whom have been doing demeaning, low-end jobs since the end of the last movie saw them fired, get recruited to go up north and begin the work. This is an R-rated raunch-fest rife with flatulence gags, dope jokes, and much worse, and when the Troopers become involved with the Mounties, well, look out! One of the Mounties is actually a real Canadian, that being Will Sasso BC. Although I have always admired is talent, I feel sorry for him stuck in the mess, along with Rob Lowe, Brian Cox, and ex-TV-Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter. There will certainly be those who think it's funny, and frankly, there is a laugh or two, but mostly it';s just a raunchy comedy from another era. Rated 18A.

The Vault (2017):

This pedestrian horror movie has some very interesting actors that signed on. It’s too bad that the execution of the film wasn’t as good as the cast. The premise is that of a bank heist, with a group of crooks taking over a bank at closing time, after setting a fire in a warehouse nearby as a distraction. They takeover inside the bank terrorizing the employees, covering their heads with bags threatening to shoot anyone who steps out of line. When just $70,000 is found in the vault, the baddies don’t believe it … they feel there has to be more money somewhere. A man identifying himself as the assistant manager (James Franco), says he’ll help,
as long as the crooks promise not to hurt anyone. He tells them the big money, $6 million, is in an old vault in the basement. What he doesn’t tell them is that the basement is haunted. The story itself, although predictable, is entertaining … the problem is that much of the real action takes place in the basement, in the dark, where we really can’t see what’s going on. Francesca Eastwood (Clint’s daughter) and Q’arianka Kilcher (Pocahontas), and Clifton Collins, Jr.
(Westworld) also star. Rated 14A.

Sicario:

Emily Blunt is sensational here as a tough, gritty FBI agent named Kate Macer, working a drug operation on the US Mexico border that reveals an ugly underbelly to the cartels which we already thought were as brutal and blood-thirsty a lot as ever saw the light of day ... but Sicario shows that we ain&#39;t seen nothin&#39; yet. The title is cartel slang for &quot;hitman,&quot; and there are a lot of them on both sides of this gripping tale that takes us into a world before unseen, and then, with tension that sucks the life out of us like a vampire with a straw, we are pulled more and more deeply into the story. Josh Brolin is Matt Graver, a more senior agent who seems to be playing cat-and-mouse with Kate, and as they cross the border into Mexico, he offers little to help her about the operation they are about to unleash. Dead bodies are everywhere in this film - they are boarded up inside the walls of drug houses, they hang from pedestrian overpasses in the
border town of Juarez, and they sit, killed execution-style, behind the wheel of the cars that they
drove to make a deal, but ended up executed. The tension continues to ramp up until we can
almost not stand it, and an ending that you won&#39;t see coming left most in the audience reeling. The Director here is Quebec&#39;s Denis Villeneuve (Incendies) who does a masterful job. Rated 14A here, R in the States.

Witch Hunt (1995):

You can find this very interesting film squirreled away in Crave's "Hidden Gems" section. Dennis Hopper stars as a private detective in the 1950s, but it's not the '50s that you may recall ... in this era, everything is as it was then, except for the fact that everybody uses magic. As private eye H. Phillip Lovecraft, a tip of the hat to sci-fi/horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, we meet then one man who does not (and maybe cannot) use magic. Hired to find why a young starlet's (Penelope Anne Miller) career has stalled, Lovecraft's lack of magic might just be the edge he needs. Dennis Hopper, when making the talk show rounds promoting this movie, said at the time that it was the strangest movie he had ever been in. Rated 14A.

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Battalion (2018):

Here's a hint .. if you are going to produce a sci-fi movie about an alien invasion that the US Marines take on face-to-face, might be a good idea to get some Americans
to play the Marines instead of a group of Aussies who spend more energy struggling to put on and American accent than they do fighting the baddies, who look like they were created by a little kid with a box of crayons and a scanner. So this is a warning, not a recommendation. The premise is just fine, but the film, shot entirely in Australia, pretending to be such places as Los Angeles and New York, just doesn't work on any level, so if you value your time, you may not want to get caught up in this alleged action thriller, hoping that it's going to get better. It does not. Rated 14A.